Petzel is presenting Heart in the corner of the room, an exhibition of early paintings by Ross Bleckner, at its Upper East Side gallery at 35 East 67th Street in New York. The show runs from 3 November to 17 December 2026 on the parlor floor, and is Bleckner's second exhibition with Petzel and his first at the Upper East Side space.

Every painting in the show was made between 1975 and 1979, and none has been exhibited before. They belong to the years before the work Bleckner became widely known for in the 1980s, and they offer a first public look at the foundations of his practice: canvases made when the artist was still working out the language of light, pattern and atmosphere that would define his later paintings.

The title work's companion image, After Constantine's Dream from 1978, is among the paintings on view, a reminder that even in this early period Bleckner was reaching for subjects that sit between the observed and the imagined. The parlor-floor rooms, domestic in scale, suit work of this intimacy, giving the early canvases a setting closer to the rooms in which they were made than to a white cube.

The show's title, Heart in the corner of the room, suggests an emotion kept to the edge of the picture, present but not centred, a fitting frame for paintings that have themselves waited at the edge of public view. For a painter whose reputation rests on a later decade, a show of unseen work from the 1970s is a rare chance to see the starting point. Nearly fifty years after they were painted, these canvases arrive as a new chapter rather than a footnote.